Technology news

Apple and Nokia settled a patent lawsuit back in 2011, but now, they’re back at it again. This time, Apple is filing an antitrust lawsuit, not against Nokia but instead against third-party companies known as patent assertion entities, or PAEs, that are acting on its behalf. In retaliation for this lawsuit, Nokia is suing Apple directly.
In its lawsuit, Apple argues that Nokia already has agreements to license its patents for fair and reasonable terms, aka FRAND. But Nokia is transferring t

YouTube’s VR video collection just added a major new platform: Sony’s PlayStation VR. As spotted by UploadVR, users across Reddit, Twitter, and other sites say that Version 1.09 of YouTube adds PSVR support, although it’s apparently rolling out slowly. While we haven’t been able to confirm the change yet, it apparently lets users with headsets select the “normal version” or “PlayStation VR version” of the app at launch, then watch YouTube’s l

Disney is going to start producing shows for Snapchat. According to a report from Reuters, Disney-ABC Television Group (the company’s US TV arm) will create several new series that will exist as Snapchat Stories. The first show to launch will be a recap of ABC’s The Bachelor called Watch Party: The Bachelor on January 3rd.
Details on the Bachelor recap are scarce. Deadline reports that the series will be 10 episodes long, with “celebrities, comedians, super fans and infamous Ba

I never expected to love a show about men’s figure skating, but anime has proven me wrong. Yuri on Ice (stylized as Yuri!!! On Ice) debuted this year online to instant love and praise in social spaces like Twitter and Tumblr.The 12-episode sports anime, directed by Lupin the Third: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine’s Sayo Yamamoto and written by Mitsurō Kubo, is an intimate look into the lives of international figure skaters. Its finale airs today, but thanks to its easy accessibilit

I have a confession to make: I haven’t seen Moana yet. According to my colleague Tasha Robinson, it’s really good, and what I’ve heard so far of the soundtrack sounds great, but I just haven’t had the spare time to get to a theater (okay, that’s also not entirely true, but it was super cold last weekend and I didn’t want to go outside).
But fortunately for busy (read: lazy) people like me, Disney has seen fit to upload almost every single major musical number

By Star Wars standards, Rogue One is a morally complex story. From beginning to end, it’s a film about war and espionage, and it provides some surprising depth to the nature of the Rebel Alliance. Forest Whitaker’s character, Saw Gerrera, helps bring some reality to the Alliance, and the question of how they’re conducting their operations.
Spoilers for Rogue One follow.Saw Gerrera first appeared in 2012, in the fifth season of the Star Wars animated series The Clone Wars. As th

Brianna Wu, a Boston-based game developer known for her opposition to online harassment, has said she’s planning to run for a House of Representatives seat in 2018. While Wu hasn’t officially started a campaign, she posted a promotional Facebook picture indicating that she would run, and confirmed her intentions in a statement to VentureBeat. Her policy platform will include an emphasis on women’s rights and “a bolder Democratic party” that addresses the gap between

After duking it out over nature’s most beautiful spotted and striped animals, scientists on Twitter are now submitting some good beards for consideration. You can check out all of them via the hashtag #BestBeard, but just so you know there are definitely some tweets with that hashtag that have absolutely nothing to do with the important discussion at hand.
This particular debate was kicked off by Dustin Ranglack, an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska at Kearney who specializ

The moody first teaser for Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming Blade Runner 2049 arrived earlier this week, and the footage couldn’t be more different from his currently-in-theaters film, the thoughtful, patient Arrival. Starring Amy Adams as a linguistics expert brought in to decode the language of an alien race that mysteriously arrives on Earth’s doorstep, Arrival blends hard science fiction with a hopeful take on humanity’s ability to work together. It’s one of our favo

Spoilers ahead.
Regardless of how he’s marketed, Darth Vader is supposed to be a frightening character. The trouble is, unless you’ve dug deeper into Star Wars lore than the average fan, you’ve probably never seen why Vader is such a heart-stopping terror. Even when he’s Force choking Imperial peons or fighting his son, he’s holding something back. Which is why I’m still trying to pick my jaw off the floor after seeing a truly demonic Vader cut down Rebel figh

 Facebook’s shadowy Building 8 research team needs help from academia to invent futuristic hardware. But today’s pace of innovation doesn’t allow for the standard 9-12 month turnaround time it takes universities to strike one-off research partnerships with private companies. Enter SARA, aka Facebook’s “Sponsored Academic Research Agreement.” It’s a… Read More

Lens attachments have been a mainstay accessory for iPhones for years thanks to companies like Olloclip and Moment. But we’ve never seen anything quite like this new idea from a company called Kamerar, if only because the iPhone has always only had one camera on the back.Kamerar developed a pretty clever case-and-clip solution for sliding different lens attachments over the cameras on the back of the iPhone 7 Plus. $45 gets you two clips: one that turns the wide angle into a fisheye and th

The world’s smallest snowman is less than three microns tall, according to Aeon science editor Corey Powell. He tweeted that information to the whole world, linking to a post on a Tumblr run by the nanofabrication lab at Western University in Ontario, Canada.Three microns. Just three (but actually a little bit less). How big is that? I don’t know, because human eyes and brains can’t perceive things that small. I mean, technically a micron is one-millionth of a meter and this sn

Snap, Inc. is building a presence in China despite the fact that its Snapchat app is banned in the country, according to a report from CNN. Snap’s Chinese operation will reportedly focus on Spectacles. The company already assembles the video-recording sunglasses in China, but the new recruits will focus on research and development. Job applications were spotted on WeChat by the Chinese tech news website NetEase. The job description requires potential hires to have at least three years of e

Palantir, the data-mining firm co-founded by tech billionaire and Trump transition adviser Peter Thiel, has provided largely secret assistance to the US Customs and Border Protection agency (CBP) in operating a system that tracks and assesses immigrants and other travelers, according to public records. Known as the Analytical Framework for Intelligence, the system draws from a variety of federal, state, and local law enforcement databases that gather and analyze often-sensitive details about peo

2016 continued the push towards cord-cutting that Roku helped pioneer. But with more alternatives to cable subscriptions than ever, including Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Google Chromecast, it’s no longer the only rooster in the henhouse. Its response: a diverse new line of products that range from the high-end Roku Ultra, the mainstream Roku Premiere and Roku Streaming Stick, and lastly the minimal Roku Express. Though the selection can be confusing, Roku is try

Earlier this year, my colleague Vlad Savov covered the Corsair Vengeance LED DDR4 RAM, which science had empirically determined to be the most lit RAM ever made. However, where many of us were simply blinded by the Vengeance LED’s pulsing red LED lights, high-end RAM manufacturer G.Skill seems to have taken it as a challenge, which the company has met with its new Trident Z RGB DDR4 RAM modules.Unlike the Vengeance LED, which only offered a single color of RAM illumination, the Trident Z R

Popular YouTube vlogger Adam Saleh claims he and a friend were ejected from a Delta airplane this morning for speaking Arabic, an experience he documented on Twitter and Periscope. Though some details surrounding the incident remain unclear, an online hashtag #BoycottDelta has erupted since Saleh’s video surfaced, with users decrying Delta’s actions and discrimination from passengers.
In the viral Twitter clip, filmed onboard a Delta plane, Saleh says he was speaking Arabic with fell

Despite running into some bad press, Super Mario Run has so far stacked an impressive amount of downloads, cruising through the 40 million mark in just four days. Nintendo revealed the accomplishment in a new press release issued earlier today. In addition to topping the “free” chart of the App Store in 140 different global markets (out of the 150 where it’s available), the game also made it into the top 10 best grossing games in 100 different markets. By comparison, smas

Wes Anderson is making a stop-motion animated movie about dogs on an island called Isle of Dogs. He made the announcement today in a YouTube video, where he also announced his partnership with the funding platform CrowdRise. Through CrowdRise, Anderson is hosting a raffle, from which one winner will be chosen to voice a dog in the movie.
Each raffle ticket entry is $10, and all proceeds from the raffle will go toward Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation, which works to restore old movies. &ld

Earlier this year, the Berkeley Institute, a private academic institution, listed a seminar on “Heterodox Science.” The seminar was first scheduled to begin in November, then moved to January. On the Institute’s website, the instructor of the Heterodox Science course has been described only as “Guest Instructor: Author & Founder of IMITATIO.” The accompanying photo is of the back of a white man’s head. IMITATIO has three founders; two are dead. The third i

Last month, Uber unveiled a totally redesigned and streamlined version of its app that featured a cleaner interface and way less confusion around which service to request. The company also promised to add a couple of new things: a Snapchat filter and the ability to use a friend’s location as your destination. Today, those features go live, and The Verge got an early look to see how it works.
The Snapchat filter only works when you’re in the vehicle en route to your destination. Swipe

As we head into the final weeks of 2016, the inevitable nostalgia for six to 11 months ago is engulfing the pop culture universe. This week, we look back on some of the most awful, inexplicable entertainment we experienced in 2016 — the “how did this get made, and why did we suffer through it?” memes, moments, and movies that made our jobs harder and our lives sadder.
Don’t miss our previous best-ofs:
The pre-2016 entertainment that got us through 2016
The weirdest pop-cu

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Everything that Apple did, and didn’t do, with its Mac lineup this year tells me the company would rather be selling more iPads and iPhones. The departures from the 2016 MacBook Pro — MagSafe charger, USB and memory card slots, and a keyboard with more than 0.55mm of travel — are all things the iPad lacks. The improvements to the same machine — thinner, lighter, all-metal chassis, a display with wider color gamut, and a sliver of a touchscreen called the Touch Bar —

Algoriddim’s goal over the past few years has been to redefine how much hardware and experience you need to be a DJ, and today it’s taking things to their natural conclusion by cramming every feature it can into the iPhone.
After a year on the iPad, Djay Pro is launching on the iPhone today with the same headline features: the ability to mix four tracks at once, to control video alongside those tracks, and to get started with ease.
If you’re like me and already find that Algori

In light of the stunning financial success the iPhone has proven to be over the last few years, it seems Apple has significantly scaled down its Mac production ambitions – and a recent report from Bloomberg suggests the trend might be here to stay. The last time the company brushed up its Mac Pro lineup was back in 2013, while the latest Mac Mini update dates back to 2014. And prior to the controversial release of the new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar earlier in October, the Cupertino g

Getting robots to move around safely in the physical world is tricky business. Industrial bots are big and powerful, and perfectly capable of crushing humans by accident, but kitting them out with robot vision and enough brains to avoid obstacles is costly and slows down movements. Usually, the bots simply operate on set paths instead, with humans warned to keep clear. New research from roboticists at Duke University could provide a practical solution to this problem, though — a new proces

The new season of Telltale’s video game based on The Walking Dead is the third to date, but it’s also designed in part to appeal to new players. It has a cast made up of mostly new characters — series star Clementine returns, but in a supporting role — and it takes place years after the events of season two. But even with some new faces and a change of scenery, the game still maintains what has made the series so memorable: a focus on making nearly impossible decisions un

The hair-and-makeup tax is a real thing. It might be difficult to fully grasp the amount of time it takes people with long hair, or people who feel a whole lot better with a little bit of makeup on, to get ready to head out the door if you fall into neither category, but trust me: it takes time away from other things you’d rather be doing.So when Dyson said earlier this year that it had reinvented the hair dryer, building one with a powerful 13-blade motor, high-velocity airstream, and te

For lots of people, the year 2016 can’t end soon enough. Whether it’s the bitter, divisive presidential election; the misery in Syria; the horrible terrorist attacks in various cities; or the deaths of beloved figures, it’s been a lousy year.It’s also been a mixed year for the major tech companies, with a few big strides and many other missed chances. Their leaders sure didn’t look happy at the year’s end, gathered at Trump Tower last week with a soon-to-be Pr

Amazon is kicking off the holiday season by giving its customers the entire catalog of country music star Garth Brooks, the best-selling solo artist in US history. Brooks’ 16-album collection will be available exclusively on Amazon Music, starting on December 24th at the stroke of midnight Eastern Standard time. Fans who are Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers can stream the entire compilation, and Brooks’ albums will also be made available for purchase and digital downloads.The onlin

Nintendo’s first proper smartphone game has proved to be a huge hit. According to the company, Super Mario Run was downloaded more than 40 million times in its first four days of availability on iOS, breaking the App Store record for number of downloads during that span. Previous reports pegged the game’s debut at around 2.85 million downloads in its first day, though these are the first official numbers to come from Nintendo.
That success was aided in part by a global launch, that s

500 Startups‘ Founder and Partner Dave McClure is one of the most renowned angel investors in Silicon Valley. His name is often placed on an elite list that includes the likes of Chris Sacca, Keith Rabois and Peter Thiel. People call them the Super Angels: a hybrid between VCs and angels who invest big, and invest early. In the 15 years before founding 500 Startups, Dave built and sold an early technology consultancy company, worked as Director of Marketing for PayPal, Acting Investment D

Remember when Apple came out with its six-guns a blazin' to announce its Mac Pro and a return to US manufacturing? It was a big deal for much of 2013 and 2014, accompanied by a lot of flag-waving bombast and back-patting bravado. But then Apple fell mysteriously silent on the topic as the months turned into years without any upgrades.It was President Obama who at the beginning of 2011 asked Steve Jobs what it would take to build iPhones in the United States. Why can't that work come home, the pr

You might be willing to pay a hefty $69 to replace your lost Apple AirPods, but there’s one hero who refuses to play by the book. Anticipating the treacherous moment of losing his newly acquired wireless earbuds, Andrew Cornett has devised the perfect solution to preventing his AirPods from falling out of his ear. But it’s… not exactly a standard fix. While netizens have been ruthlessly mocking the protruding stems of the AirPods, Cornett leveraged their unusual des